December 7, 2018

"Per Mark Lamster’s new The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century, the answer is nothing short of astonishing, albeit only in the negative sense of the word," writes Armin Rosen in Tablet.

In 1934, the 28-year-old Johnson and one of his assistants left their posts as architectural curators at the Museum of Modern Art to begin a brownshirts-style discussion group and activist organization in Johnson’s Manhattan townhouse. Johnson had been enthralled by a Hitler Youth rally he attended in Potsdam in 1933 and wrote an article that same year lauding the Third Reich’s architecture; later he would witness two of the notorious annual Nuremberg rallies, in 1937 and 1938.....

Johnson wasn’t attracted to fascism for narrowly aesthetic or psycho-sexual reasons as he later claimed but because he actually seemed to believe in the idea. “It was easier to whitewash sexual desire than the egregious social and political ideas that truly captivated him,” Lamster writes—after all, Johnson was the kind of Hitler fan who had read Mein Kampf in the original German.

"There was wide spread admiration for fascism (both German and Italian) by the "elites" in the U.S. prior to World War II."

Hey, someone even wrote a book about "liberal fascism."

Before Trump, even Bernie mixed a little nationalism into his socialism. With help from Muslims, now in Congress, the left is getting its antisemitic mojo back as well. Antifa already has got the fa violence part down.

That was really interesting. Thanks. I enjoyed the last two paragraphs.A fun thing to do while visiting any major city it sign up for an architectural walking tour. I often fail to remember who-designed-what, but like knowing the names of tall mountains, it's fun to know who designed the buildings we see every day.

There were plenty of socialists/progressives in the 1930s that thought Fascism and National Socialism were the future of mankind. These were simply nationalist versions of socialism that rejected international socialism and communism as a failure.

That's fucking insulting. I'm part Anglo and part Ashkenazi, and this: "after all, Johnson was the kind of Hitler fan who had read Mein Kampf in the original German," is disgusting garbage. Thanks for the link. My Jewish Brothers and Sisters, time to reconcile the Holocaust, and not use it as your secular weapon against wrongthink.

What's weird about the architecture and the SS, (and I'm no expert so correct me if I'm wrong) but architecturally, it started as a rejection of modernism and an embrace of a sort of progressively stern Neo-classical appearance.

The Nazis won one, or maybe two, elections and then after that it was a pretend democracy. Here, more or less, were there political messages:

They were strongly opposed to capitalists, the Jews, and the elite.

They were strongly for the environment, animal rights, and teachers. (It may seem odd to mention teachers. After all what political party in Germany was opposed to teachers? But the National Socialists seemed to truly idolize educators and the practical consequence of that was that being a teacher was seen as sufficient qualification by itself for high-level government jobs in Nazi Germany.)

They were anti-war and anti-military (over one-third of the German military was purged after the Nazi victory).

They were anti-Catholic. (In fact Hitler had talked about hanging every priest.)

They believed there were too many people in the world and they believed in abortion.

They were opposed to free speech.

They were opposed to individualism.

They believed in an extremely powerful centralized government that controlled virtually all aspects of life.

They were extremely popular with young people with allegedly over 90% of students at universities and high schools supporting the Nazis. They were popular with educators. They were popular with a significant portion, maybe the majority, of factory workers.

They were not popular with the elite outside of educators. It seems likely that the older a person was, then the less likely that they would vote for the Nazis.

They were opposed by the Communists. They were allegedly opposed by the Social Democrats but it's likely that the majority of the people that voted for the Nazis were former Social Democrats.

The Nazis thought that a modern state should be built on scientific principles, the science being biology, i.e., Darwinian evolutionary thinking. This meant accepting that some human groups were being exterminated by natural selection but going a step further and thinking that they knew which groups natural selection was after - the Jews, the Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, blacks. Then the Nazis went another step by deciding that they wanted to make natural selection move faster by social policies assisting this predestined group extermination. The result shocked the world.

But after the war was over there were still progressives in America who wanted to build a modern state on scientific principles, the science being biology, i.e., Darwinian evolutionary thinking. This meant accepting that some human groups were being exterminated by natural selection but going a step further and thinking that they knew which groups natural selection was after, the African-Americans. Then the progressives went another step by deciding that they wanted to make natural selection move faster by social policies assisting this predestined group extermination. They founded Planned Parenthood. The idea was to carry out their goals by birth control, not death control. As a result, the African-American birth rate has fallen below replacement level and the community is declining both relative to other groups and in absolute numbers.

But it's OK to be for this as long as you call it being for planned parenthood. It's OK not to know about it. It's OK to ignore the implications and consequences of your beliefs. Beto and Bernie and Hilly and Schumer and Pelosi are for it. Obama is for it. Michelle refuses to know about it. Rachel Maddow won't discuss it. Pocahontas is for it though the Native American community was also targeted and is also declining. Really, it's quite OK to support the destruction of these minority communities in this way. Especially when you know that Donald Trump is against it. And so is Brett Kavanaugh.

GB Shaw thought Mussolini was doing socialism right. IIRC, Pound admired the costumes introduced by dear leader almost as much as he did double entry bookkeeping. Lots of intellectuals and left wing artists found much to admire in the fascists. Yeah, Jews emigrated if they could, but non Jewish emigrants were celebrated because they were so rare. The violinist Busch comes to mind, but his son in law was Serkin.

1. Old news2. Anyone serious about understanding ww2 and nazism reads Mein Kampf. If you read German you read it in German. All educated people read The Communist Manifesto. This is straight up anti intellectualism by the reporter.

In the 30's, democracy seemed to be a failure. All the democratic nations were mired in depression. Capitalism seemed to have reached the endgame predicted by Marx.

If a person in those times wanted to look to the future, they had 2 choices--communism and fascism. Neither choice seems all that great in retrospect, but Hitler was saving the Germans and Stalin was managing an economic miracle. I can't blame people for signing on to one of them during the 30's. But by '38 or '39, that's when I start holding it against them.

National Socialism was a mass movement. It wasn't just about Hitler. It wasn't defined by Mein Kampf. It covers more ideas than what was stated in Mein Kampf. It was a dramatic example of collective thinking, where to be considered a good person there were certain opinions you had to say. And there were millions of people that were part of this.

National Socialism was not the opposite of Marxism. There are a number of things in National Socialism that are not mentioned in Marx's writings, but there is nothing in it that contradicts Marxism. I believe that Hitler was inspired by and imitating Lenin. Many of the things the Nazis did or tried to do were similar to what the Communists had done a generation earlier in Russia. I don't think that's a coincidence. And really, it's so obvious.

The conflict between the Nazis and the Communists was like the conflicts between different versions of Communism that were seen elsewhere.

There were three Marxist political parties in Germany before Nazi Germany: Communism, National Socialism, and the Social Democrats (who were more radical than modern day Social Democrats). Over several elections the combined voting percentage for these parties oscillated between 50 to 60%.

It may be the case that there has been no other time in history in which Marxism has been so popular, but that still leaves at least 40% of the population that was opposed to any version of it.

Johnson wasn’t attracted to fascism for narrowly aesthetic or psycho-sexual reasons as he later claimed but because he actually seemed to believe in the idea.

In this statement, there's the echo of Erich Fromm's & Wilhelm Reich's postwar analyses of the causes of Fascism. From EF &WR, the idea that Fascism had no true ideological content but rather was a sexual or psychological aberration, spread through the Frankfurt School, & from the Frankfurt School, into the general thought of the American Left.

Actually, Italian Fascism in particular was designed from the ground up by Mussolini & Giovanni Gentile (one of the foremost philosophers of his day) to be an "ideology" on a par with Marxism. Italian Fascism is an easier case than National Socialism because it's easier to say who "spoke for it". Germany was the most literate society in Europe, & needless to say, all its thinkers had their own radically disparate ideas of what constituted, to quote Martin Heidegger, "the inner greatness of National Socialism."

I agree with what wildswan & madrewa have posted above, with the caveats that 1) there were profound disagreements within Germna society on what Nazism was really about, & 2) Italian fascism & National Socialism were very different movements, with very different ideologies.

Hagar said, If you like your business you can keep your business, but you will run it the way we tell you.

Yes, that is the way it ended up being. Every large corporation had to have representatives from the National Socialist party (the only political party) on the board of directors. And of course anything the Nazis said was done.

And since it was a crime to think or do or say anything that was not government approved, this meant that regardless of whether one was a large corporation or not, if the government said, "Jump!", then you jumped. And if not you ended up in concentration camp or, more likely, a government labor battalion.

But this isn't the way it started. In 1933/1934 over one-quarter of the economy was nationalized. That became problematic and the government switched to just telling corporations what to do.

Even so this was likely not the long-term Nazi goal. Volkswagen, after all, began as a government agency. This was probably the future they imagined. It was only in post-war Germany that Volkswagen was turned into a corporation.

Could the search for renowned yet would-be historically closeted 'Nazi sympathizers' unwittingly renew interest in Nazism all over again?

Is the risk worth it?

I watched PBS's 'Birth of a Movement' a few days ago, partly about how D.W. Griffith's 'Birth of a Nation' was a racist propaganda film that set back the cause of blacks in this country at that time. The film is credited with the resurgence of the KKK, at that time. And yet Griffith's Bing today says... "The Birth of a Nation made use of advanced camera and narrative techniques, and its popularity set the stage for the dominance of the feature-length film in the United States."

The question could be, can a Great man be a Nazi, a very bad man, and continue to be thought of as "Great", today?

Think about this for one minute. We have no more counter-cyclical measures for the next recession. We can't do a stimulus, and the Fed never unwound from the last monetary injection. Therefore, we are in for a true Weimar tailspin, hyperinflation. We could always get "lucky" and instead have two decades of stagflation or deflation. What a great fucking job, Boomers!

Could the search for renowned yet would-be historically closeted 'Nazi sympathizers' unwittingly renew interest in Nazism all over again?

Is the risk worth it?

I think it's already happened. I think that some of the Alt-Right are groups that have discovered how much Fascism of the Italian variety or National Socialism "makes sense", and is not simply brutal & unthinking fear mongering as it's often portrayed.

But the path into the darknesses of the past can be meandering & not direct. The Fascisms of the post-WWI world saw themselves as critics of the Enlightenment & of modernity in general. Thus, these Fascisms share a spirit with the post-modernisms of the Left, which also see the heritage of the Enlightenment as the "enemy". Thus, one can start out on the post-modern Left & easily find that one has wandered into the spiritual territory of Italian Fascism.

The next recession will likely be forced by progressive costs in the medical sector, which has been delayed with Obamacare (i.e. Medicaid expansion, redistributive change/shared responsibility), and may be controlled in a limited fashion through progressive taxation schemes (e.g. Medicare for all). There is evidence that these costs (note also education) are misaligned with the market, and are forced through central planning (e.g. laws, policies) and single-payer (e.g. insurance regulation) schemes. So, the problem is not in payment, but in costs that are not commensurate with consumption but other factors.

"It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human, and all things super-human, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.

Psychology professor accuses GOD of being a sexual predator for impregnating the Virgin Mary 'without her consent'

Associate professor Eric Sprankle made the critique via Twitter on MondayHe teaches psychology and 'sexuality studies' at the public Minnesota StateAccused Christian God of sexual misconduct for impregnating the Virgin MarySaid even though Mary agreed, her consent was negated by power differentialSprankle is a Satanist who decorated his Christmas tree with Satanic symbol.

The nazi's liked Marxist economics but they didn't like the international side of it. So they came with Nationalism to attract the upper/middle class, and kept the "Socialism" to attract the working class.

Plus, the Nazi's deliberately modeled much of their method of operation from the Communists. you had street thugs (The S/A), you had a "Party" - a state within a state, you had rallies and "Youth camps" and "Youth Organizations" etc.

The Nazi's used to say the best Nazi's were former Commies, because the mindset is the same. Its a materialist, Godless philosophy, just like Marxism.

The Commies hated that the Nazi's were working their side of the street.

After all, if the Nazi's could offer the "Workers and Peasants" German Patriotism AND Socialism, how could they compete?

So put on a propaganda campaign to sell the idea that the Nazis' were REALLY the tool of big business and bourgeois and also that Communism and Nazism were polar opposites of the political spectrum - which they aren't.

Exactly, but I think this voting ourselves into unrecoverable debt was inevitable as warned by the founders. The upcoming generation would have done it to themselves if we didn't do it for them.

Nothing seems so improbable as a democracy, even a republican one, being able to resist that corrupting temptation. The current American voting public is not up to the challenge, due to poor education, and misplaced values.

Jordan Peterson says people who think in pictures instead of words are way smarter. Something to do with aesthetics.

From a neuropsychological point of view, people who think in pictures are likely to have greater access to integrated information in their memory. This allows them to process information in a much quicker and more thorough manner.

When I went to college in the dark ages of the 1960s and '70s, we were told that none of the great intellectuals and artists of the interwar years had been sympathetic to fascists or Nazis, that almost all of them had been opponents of fascism and Nazism (no one called it National Socialism), and that many had indeed been communist sympathizers.

The takeaway was obvious: the smart and creative people are right, and communism isn't such a bad idea. But since then it has come out that lots of smart and creative people sympathized with fascism and National Socialism. Maybe intellectuals and artists aren't our betters.

The takeaway was obvious: the smart and creative people are right, and communism isn't such a bad idea

And lurking under that assumption is a much more intellectual destructive one for the Left -- why, in both its Marxist & post-Marxist incarnations, has the Left been constitutionally incapable of coming to grips with the historical reality of what European Fascisms & National Socialism actually were? Why can their ideologies not be looked at in the light of genuine historical criticism?

There has been since the late 80s/early 90s an explosion of new scholarship on the nature of the interwar regimes of "The Revolutionary Right". I strongly suspect that the fall (from grace & finally in political reality) of the Soviet Union had much to do with that explosion, especially in Europe.

My two cents: an awful lot of artsy-fartsy people seem to be attracted to totalitarian governments. Nazism, communism, as long as it’s not that messy democracy with people running around making their own decisions. Philistinism! Yuck.

The thought that their art or architecture might be among the proscribed, that they might be one of the people stood up against a concrete wall, none of that seems to penetrate their arrogant minds.

People seem to believe that Nazism was something other than a radically modern political movement. Hindenberg was a conservative. Hitler was not. If Hitler had been a conservative, he would have restored the throne and put Kaiser Bill back on it.Tom Wolfe exposed Johnson's fascism in From Bauhaus to Your House (1981). Don't people read anymore? I guess not, there is furniture manufacturer/seller called "Bauhaus 2 Your House" that seems to think Wolfe's book praised Bauhaus design.

“We believe legislation along these lines to be long overdue,” wrote the group, led by the Cornell University law professor Robert Hockett. “While some of us would like to go even further than the Act does, we all agree that your legislation takes the critical first steps in realigning our regime of incorporation with its original purposes.”

German socialism had to overcome this "private," that is, unrestrained and irresponsible view of property. All property is common property. The owner is bound by the people and the Reich to the responsible management of his goods. His legal position is only justified when he satisfies this responsibility to the community. [90] Pursuant to this view of the nature of ownership, property may be confiscated whenever the state decides that public management would be in the interests of the community, or if the owner is found guilty of irresponsible management, in which case no compensation is paid him

Warren doesn't seem to understand that "maximizing shareholder value" is closely linked to the retirement of many Americans, or at least the ones without defined pensions. Some of the DNC's biggest supporters -- teacher's unions, public service employees, etc., use the stock market to fund their retirements. So go ahead and kill the stock market, Warren, but you'd better have alternative ways for the average person to save and invest. Also, why does she spare the big banks? Why does Steve Bannon understand this better than Warren and yet Warren remains the darling of the left?

Blogger johnhenry100 said...German socialism had to overcome this "private," that is, unrestrained and irresponsible view of property.

I'll have to review my William Manchester, but it seems to me that Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach made it through the war with his fortune intact. He even avoided punishment at Nuremberg and was called back to run things at Krupp after the war.

Niall Ferguson, wrote about some of the influences that certainly hamburg businesses were subject to in 'paper and iron,' german economics since the mid 19th century, were weary of private endeavor, wagner and moller were bismark's brain trusts, and they had a decidedly dirigiste flavor to them, and this held till the time of the creditanstalt bust in 1931,

it was this view, that von mises and hayek were originally in rebellion to,

as I have pointed out in the past, alger hiss was a staffer on republican Gerald Nye's committee at the time, and his leaking certain confidential communication re the world war one period, had a lot to do ith the rise of isolationism in this period,

YoungHegelian, I read the text you linked to, "Left Fascism: George Bataille and the German Ideology," and there is something about the things that George Bataille wrote that does seem similar to things that post-modernists wrote.

I'm not a good person to judge that, since I have no sympathy with either Bataille's or the post-modernist's ideas, and my provisional putting of them into the same basket is in part based on my judgement that they are both nonsense. But that probably means that I just don't get it, and therefore I'm not the right person to look at this.

If it's true that essentially all the famous post-structuralists spent a lot of time studying and writing about George Bataille, well that is a remarkable thing. It would explain some of the weirdness of post-structuralism. It would suggest a reinterpretation of some of the post-modern texts. (I.e. do Nazi mysticism and post-structuralism share some themes?)

It's nice to have more evidence that there was a whole group of French intellectuals that were into these things. But I'm afraid this may just put this document on Google's list of books to burn.

Thank you for taking the time to slog through the link on Bataille. it's not exactly beach reading for most of humanity.

One of the things I appreiated most about the article was its "aside" discussions of other points of Right/Left intersection against "Modernity", e.g. Sorel joining the Rightists in Le Cercle Proudhon. There are multiple examples of such intersections in the history of the French Right, and they shape the development of Fascisms throughout Europe.

mandrewa:I believe that Hitler was inspired by and imitating Lenin.Listen to Dr. Goebbels.From the Vaults: New York Times, 1925.HITLERITE RIOT IN BERLINBeer Glasses Fly When Speaker Compares Hitler and LeninNew York Times, November 28, 1925, p.4.BERLIN. Nov. 27. – The National Socialist-Labor Party, of which Adolf Hitler is a patron and father, persists in believing Lenin and Hitler can be compared or contrasted in a party meeting. Two weeks ago an attempted discussion of this subject led to one death, sixty injuries and $5,000 damages to beer glasses, tables, chairs, windows and chandeliers in Chemnitz. Last night, Dr. Göbells tried the experiment in Berlin and only police intervention prevented a repetition of the Chemnitz affair.On the speaker’s assertion that Lenin was the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between communism and the Hitler faith was very slight, a faction war opened with whizzing beer glasses. When this sort of ammunition was exhausted a free fight in which fists and knives played important roles was indulged in. Later a gang marched to the offices of the socialist paper Vorwärts and smashed plate-glass windows. Police made nineteen arrests.

YoungHegelian wrote:1) there were profound disagreements within Germna society on what Nazism was really about, & 2) Italian fascism & National Socialism were very different movements, with very different ideologies.The historian Timothy Snyder (a standard academic lefty) actually took the time to read Mein Kampf and the other foundational documents of the Nazis. Snyder says that, unlike Italian fascism, Nazism put race and race war at the center of its governing philosophy. The utility of fascism, according to the Nazis, was that it allowed the state to best organize national resources for racial wars of conquest and extermination. Mussolini, on the other hand, seemed to want to be the headman of a strong village.

Hitler on the Commies. He found a fair amount of positive things to say about them. Hitler's Table Talk.

There's nothing astonishing about the fact that Communism had its strongest bastion in Saxony, or that it took us time to win over the Saxon workers to our side. Nor is it astonishing that they are now counted amongst our most loyal supporters. The Saxon bourgeoisie was incredibly narrow-minded. These people insisted that we were mere Communists. Anyone who proclaims the right to social equality for the masses is a Bolshevik! The way in which they exploited the home worker was unimaginable. It's a real crime to have turned the Saxon workers into proletarians. ....(P 19-20)...

Of course, we also had fanatics amongst the well-dressed people. Moreover, the Communists and ourselves were the only parties that had women in their ranks who shrank from nothing. It's with fine people like those that one can hold a State. (p 107)

Later on, the Reds we had beaten up became our best supporters. (p138)

Perhaps the Duce came on the scene a year or two too early with his revolution. He probably should have let the Reds have their own way for a bit first—they'd have exterminated the aristocracy. The Duce would have become Head of a Republic. Thus the abscess would have been lanced. (p268)

Stalin, too, must command our unconditional respect. In his own way he is a hell of a fellow ! He knows his models, Genghiz Khan and the others, very well, and the scope of his industrial planning is exceeded only by our own Four Year Plan. And there is no doubt that he is quite determined that there shall be in Russia no unemployment such as one finds in such capitalist States as the United States of America. . . . (P 587)

This is a reminder that NAZI Propaganda body of work is powerful and highly seductive. It is no wonder that the OSS/CIA guys who worked with it were so facinated that they brought the NAZIs over here to teach them how to embed it into their method of operation. And that operation was done of the Bush Family, by the Bush Family, and for the Bush Family. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

I don't think that's it, William butterworth (web griffins) honor and clandestine operations series suggest the early oss cic contacts was about human intelligence which required them to obscure the source of the info

The text you point to, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, looks interesting.

Reading through the sample pages that Amazon reveals, I think I can anticipate your argument that National Socialism is fundamentally different than Marxism. You're going to say that there is a coherent set of ideas at the heart of fascism and another coherent set of ideas at the heart of Marxism, and they are completely different.

Part of the difficulty of slogging through that text on George Bataille is that it is just so crazy. I said coherent above, but that is not because it appears coherent to me. I say coherent because I assume it's coherent to people that believe in this. To me it just seems crazy -- just one stupid idea after another. It boggles my mind for instance that people would take seriously a man who apparently advocates the random killing of human beings to the benefit of ourselves in some mysterious way.

If we accept that this really was the ideological heart of National Socialism, well then, that would seem a good argument that it isn't the same as Marxism.

But I would make two counter-arguments. First I confess to some skeptical. I can believe that there was core group of crazies at the heart of the Nazis that really believed things like this, but I have some doubt that the many millions of Nazis, as bad as they were, believed this.

My second objection would that these were two political movements that in fact did very similar things, and very unusual things compared the rest of the world. The likeness in action says to me that these are two things of the same kind.

(Those sample pages on Amazon reveal to me, by the way, that Zeev Sternhell's definition of Marxism is different from mine. It's apparent for instance that for Sternhell Marxism and democracy can coexist and that individualism and Marxism can also coexist. This is not the way I see it.)

I was a fan of Manchester and had read the Krupp book perhaps 40 years ago. It became available on Kindle not long ago and I had bought it. I'd forgotten until I went looking for the book I quoted from. Brought it to the top of my list for after I finish re-reading Griffin's The Corps. Thanks for reminding me.

Anyway, yes, Krupp did survive with the family fortune somewhat diminished but intact. It has to do with this:

The owner is bound by the people and the Reich to the responsible management of his goods. His legal position is only justified when he satisfies this responsibility to the community. [90] Pursuant to this view of the nature of ownership, property may be confiscated whenever the state decides that public management would be in the interests of the community, or if the owner is found guilty of irresponsible management, in which case no compensation is paid him

Krupp managed the firm "responsibly" to benefit the "interests of the community". Most people think socialism is about the ownership of the means of production. Most people do not stop to think what "ownership" really means.

The National Socialist/Communist/Fascist government doesn't need to have their name on a piece of paper. All they need is for the person whose name is on the paper to let them control the means of production.

The Russian communists found a huge problem when they took over private companies after the revolution. There was now nobody to run them. For all the talk of worker cooperatives and government bureaus, it takes people with management type skills, and preferably some skin in the game to run anything larger than a garage shop. The German National Socialists and Italian Fascists realized this. They left the owners in nominally in charge. The owners, Krupps, Agnellis and so on, were so grateful that they did whatever was asked of them to keep their positions of power.

I have no idea why the allies let Krupp keep on after the war. Perhaps for the same reason the National Socialists did. They needed him to run the company. Or there may have been darker motives.

Speaking of Germans and Krupps and completely off topic, I've been doing a lot of work for a German company this year.

It was founded in the 1600s and is still in the same family. A descendant of the founder, with his last name, is currently chairman. Think about all the upheavals in Europe over the past 400+ years and this company somehow managed to come through. Not a small company either. About 13,000 employees and plants in a couple dozen countries.

In the US we go shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations. Sometimes, when the fortune is really huge, like the Kennedy's or the Rockefellers, it takes 4 or even 5 generations to piss it away completely. But piss it away they do eventually.

In the US we go shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations. Sometimes, when the fortune is really huge, like the Kennedy's or the Rockefellers, it takes 4 or even 5 generations to piss it away completely. But piss it away they do eventually.

A family fortune is diluted with each generation, especially with large families.